Scenario 1: A friend who you know to generally be fairly trustworthy tells you that there is a snowstorm in New York City.
Scenario 2: A friend who you know to generally be fairly trustworthy tells you that there is a snowstorm in Ecuador.
Scenario 3: A friend who you know to generally be fairly trustworthy tells you that there is a snowstorm on the surface of Venus, which they spotted by looking up into the sky with their keen vision after Batman showed up and used his power ring to grant them super senses.
As I understand your comment above, it sounds like you’re saying you will evaluate the veracity of the three scenarios above the same way, caring only about the friend’s trustworthiness and not at all about how implausible the story sounds. This seems very strange—am I misunderstanding?
The ‘paradox’ being mentioned in the post is that Xavier Williams winning the lottery seems like it should be a plausible-sounding story (a la Scenario A), but a naive mathematical analysis (missing Phil’s point above) makes it seem like a very implausible-sounding one.
No, these are completely different. NYC and Equador are not random samples of places where a snowstorm is equally likely. A more charitable comparison would be “It’s winter in the Northern Hemisphere, and there was a snowstorm in one of the major cities. Yovanni checks the weather app and says that it’s in NYC.”
Scenario 1: A friend who you know to generally be fairly trustworthy tells you that there is a snowstorm in New York City.
Scenario 2: A friend who you know to generally be fairly trustworthy tells you that there is a snowstorm in Ecuador.
Scenario 3: A friend who you know to generally be fairly trustworthy tells you that there is a snowstorm on the surface of Venus, which they spotted by looking up into the sky with their keen vision after Batman showed up and used his power ring to grant them super senses.
As I understand your comment above, it sounds like you’re saying you will evaluate the veracity of the three scenarios above the same way, caring only about the friend’s trustworthiness and not at all about how implausible the story sounds. This seems very strange—am I misunderstanding?
The ‘paradox’ being mentioned in the post is that Xavier Williams winning the lottery seems like it should be a plausible-sounding story (a la Scenario A), but a naive mathematical analysis (missing Phil’s point above) makes it seem like a very implausible-sounding one.
No, these are completely different. NYC and Equador are not random samples of places where a snowstorm is equally likely. A more charitable comparison would be “It’s winter in the Northern Hemisphere, and there was a snowstorm in one of the major cities. Yovanni checks the weather app and says that it’s in NYC.”